A petition drive aimed at getting Durham to withdraw from Regional School Unit 5 has yet to meet the minimum number of signatures needed to move the issue forward.

On Monday, about a month since the papers appeared at the Durham Get & Go, the petition was still short 45 signatures.

Town Clerk Shannon Plourde said Monday morning that Get & Go owner Donna Church brought the list to the Town Office last Friday. Plourde said she was checking the residences for 169 signers of the petition.

“I’m counting them now,” she said.

To bring the matter to the Board of Selectmen, 214 signatures of Durham residents are needed.

Church has said she is not the person who started the petition. The Tri-Town Weekly has contacted several town officials, and no one has identified who started the signature drive.

Church did not return phone calls Monday from the Tri-Town Weekly as to why she submitted the petition without the necessary number of signatures.

Should the effort garner the 214 valid signatures needed, the Board of Selectmen would call a special election to vote on whether the town should commence the process of withdrawal from the district, which also includes Freeport and Pownal. Residents would vote on an article that would specify a dollar amount to be raised to support legal and other withdrawal costs.

That’s as far as a Durham withdrawal effort got three years ago. When voters saw an estimated withdrawal cost of $1.1 million, they defeated the effort by a decisive margin, 828-287.

The Durham movement comes less than a year after Freeport voters ended a protracted withdrawal battle by deciding in a close vote to stay with RSU 5.

The subject came up briefly during last Wednesday’s meeting of the RSU 5 Board of Directors. John Egan of Freeport said from the audience he had read of the Durham petition.

“Frankly,” Egan said, “that took my breath away because I thought we were past all that.”

No one from the board responded.

Residents of Durham and Pownal have mostly voted against RSU 5 budgets, and last year was no exception. The $29.4 million budget passed for 2015-2016 represents a 7.8 overall spending increase, including an 8.7 percent tax increase for education in Durham.

The overall tax increase in Durham is less than that, according to Administrator Ruth Glaeser. The property tax increase for the 2015 tax year was 4.5 percent, Glaeser said. Neither Glaeser nor Milt Simon, chairman of the Budget Committee, returned calls about the tax increase for the Tri-Town Weekly publication deadline.